Assemblies of the present type serve for screwing together elements such as pedicle screws or pedicle hooks in a polyaxial, rigid manner, and are used in particular in the area of the spinal column. However, these assemblies may also be employed for plating in general. Additional fields of application include use in combination with external fixators and intervertebral implants.
A device of this type is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 6,235,033, in which a screw head and the bore of the bone plate are held together by an angularly adjustable, annular bushing which is compressible and expansible by means of a slot so as to achieve an improved fastening of the screw in the plate. This known device, however, suffers from the disadvantage that the bushing used is of circular shape so that it may rotate together with the screw as the screw is screwed in, thus preventing it from becoming locked within the plate. The bushing may even turn around completely within the plate hole, so that the wrong side thereof faces upward (the inner cone tapering in the wrong direction). The present invention is intended to provide a remedy for this undesirable movement of the bushing relative to the bone plate.
It is accordingly an object of the present invention to provide a device for osteosynthesis in which the bone screws are polyaxially movable and lockable in an angularly stable manner relative to the bone plate without the need for any additional mechanical elements.
It should be emphasized that the discussion of the state of the art as set out above is merely intended to illustrate the background of the invention and does not mean that at the moment of filing the present application, or its priority application, the cited state of the art was actually published or otherwise publicly known.